As many of you know I like to beta DFSORT function PTFs. About once a year a new set of functions appears, many in direct response to customer requirements. Occasionally some of the enhancements are at my suggestion. :-) Yesterday PTFs UK90006 and UK90007...

Here's my first tip with the new UK90006 / UK90007 DFSORT PTFs. It's an apparently minor enhancement that I think people will like... It leads to a more elegant syntactical expression. It is more maintainable - in the face of changing record layouts. Suppose...

I plan on writing some entries on creating and parsing XML with DFSORT (using the UK90006 / UK90007 functional enhancments that DFSORT Development recently announced). But here's a limbering up example - creating a CSV file from regular sequential file input....

Following on from This entry on creating CSV files here's the first of several entries on manipulating XML with DFSORT... This is not intended to be a tutorial on XML but rather an exploration of how DFSORT can read (shred) and write (compose) XML. (I also use...

In Generating XML Using DFSORT - Part I I described how to generate XML using some of DFSORT's new features. But the XML we generated was only one of the possible styles of XML: Most of the information was specified as attributes (with the values enclosed in...

Following on from Generating XML Using DFSORT - Part II here are some thoughts on how to parse XML with DFSORT. NOTE: For more complex XML than this entry describes you probably want to use the XML Toolkit for z/OS . This provides C++ and Java parsers for XML...

Nope, I'm not going to do a Rumsfeld. :-) But there are a couple of things I didn't know (I didn't know) about DFSORT. Relating them to you is probably OK because It's not something I'm embarrassed about.:-) If you want to understand some of the funkier new...

( Scroll down if you're not interested in DB2 ) This past week I've been updating our SQL Analysis code to cope with Unicode SQL statements. (If you bind a package or plan once you've gone to DB2 Version 8 New Function Mode the statement text is stored in the...

(Also posted to MXG-L Listserver (MXG-L@PEACH.EASE.LSOFT.COM) which I highly recommend as a place where mainframe performance people hang out.) I must confess I feel slightly foolish about this... :-) After having asked for input into my UKCMG BOF one of the...

!Somehow I seem to have end up writing a "Memories of..." series of blog posts. That wasn't the intention but a set of threads on IBM-MAIN Listserver got me to thinking about these nice venerable technologies - VIO, Hiperbatch, Batch LSR and Pipes. By couching...

In September 1997 DFSORT Release 13 was shipped (to coincide with the release of OS/390 Release 4). It took a nice idea from Syncsort and extended it. In case you didn't know OUTFIL allows you to read an input data set (and perhaps sort it) and write to...

Yesterday DFSORT announced a new set of functions - as PTF UK90013. The documentation for it can be found here . Every year or so there's a new set of DFSORT functions - and generally they're "out of cycle" with z/OS releases - although they are incorporated...

As I mentioned in this blog post DFSORT just shipped a new FINDREP function to do "find and replace". I mentioned an example of where I might use it to replace SMFIDs in SMF records. That example generally works well. But suppose (say, for SMF 42-6 Data Set...

So here's yet another way of parsing the WLM XML Service Definition. This time it's on z/OS, using DFSORT. Relatively recent features in DFSORT have made it easier to do useful things with XML. In this example I've made some attempt to make the output pretty -...

For whoever got to my blog with this Google search here's how you sort data without a header: First you need to be using z/OS DFSORT Release 10 or to have applied the PTFs for UK90013 (July 2008). Second, the vehicle for doing this is ICETOOL rather than...

To whoever (In the USA I think) Googled "what is REMOVECC" and got to this blog let me give you my thoughts on the matter. (And yes I know, it being a search, you might never come back to read this.) To understand REMOVECC you have to understand that the "CC"...

A new set of function was recently made available for DFSORT via PTFs UK51706 and UK51707. In this post I want to talk about the new JOINKEYS function, and try to add a little value by discussing some performance considerations. I've had the code for a couple...

First a word of thanks to Ferdy for his insightful comment on Batch Architecture, Part Zero . And also to my IBM colleague Torsten Michelmann for his offline note on the subject. As I indicated in Part Zero I hoped to talk about jobs in a subsequent post. And...

Thanks to Scott Drummond for reminding me of last Autumn's DFSORT Function PTFs - UK90025 and UK90026. They're mentioned in the preview for z/OS Release 13 so now is not such a bad time to be talking about them. So let me pick out a few highlights: Translation...

I concluded Batch Architecture - Part One with a brief mention of inter-relationships and data. I'd like to expand on that on this part. Often the inter-relationships between applications are data driven - which is why I'm linking the two in this post (and in...

In the distant past I've written about using DFSORT to parse XML. This post (and two follow-on posts) will describe
an experiment to make such processing much more robust. In this post I'll talk about what the problem I'm trying to solve is. And why. And a...

This is the second part of a (currently) three-part series on processing XML data with DFSORT, given a little help from standard XML processing tools. The first part - which you should read before reading on - is here . To recap, getting XML data into DFSORT...

Following on from this post and this one , this post discusses the DFSORT piece. The DFSORT code in this post parses the Comma-Separated Variable (CSV) file produced by XSLT processing. In this simple example it merely produces a flat file report, but the post...

While I was putting together the original three posts in this series a number of thoughts struck me, amongst which two really cried out for further investigation: I don't know how your XML data arrives on z/OS but quite a lot of scenarios don't have...

Have you ever had the suspicion a sort was unnecessary in your batch? I bet you have. In recent Batch Performance studies I've had the suspicion that many of the sorts are unnecessary: Either they should be merges or not done at all. But how do you prove it?...